Mandajuice

Polyamory - Part one of the rest of my life

One of the things I'm learning in my stand-up class is just how alternative my lifestyle really is. I'll get up in front of the mic and do a bit about vagina waxing, then one about how all my boyfriends are bald and then one about lipstick lesbian manicures. But when it's time for feedback, everyone's like, wait. HOLD THE PHONE. WHUT? They can't laugh at my sexy nail-clipping bit because they're still stuck on the fact that my clients call me the Vagina Whisperer and I have more than one (bald) boyfriend.

"I realize making women get on their hands and knees to wax their butt cracks is totally normal for you, but give the rest of us time to catch up!" 

"I make men do that too," I say with a shrug. "Duh. It's the best part of the wax."

So maybe I am a little... different. 

I prefer it this way. I didn't just fall out of a tree and decide to be weird. I'm actually doing all of this on purpose. With intention. I'm not a "normal" girl and I don't have traditional values. I thrive on chaos and noise and excitement and I am passionate to a fault. I'm lucky to have a job where it will never matter that I have purple hair and tattoos. No one cares how weird their waxer is (nor their comedian, now that I think about it). 

So after a few years of fucking it up royally at every attempt, I've finally decided to go ahead and give up on monogamy. I know I'm not the only one doing it wrong. If the divorce rate has anything to say about it, it's that monogamy rarely works out the way we think it will, forever and ever and always, amen. Hell, maybe it works for you, but it has done nothing but suck for me. So there's my insanity plea - why keep trying the same thing over and over again and expecting it to make you happy? I am happiest when I'm in love. I am happiest when I am dating. I feel strongly that those two phenomena don't have to be mutually exclusive. 

So here's how it works... Patrick is my boyfriend. My Person. In polyspeak he'd be my Primary Partner, but that's just a fancy way of saying he's the one I'm in love with. The first and last person I want to talk to every day. Fortunately, since Patrick isn't monogamous either, falling in love with him didn't mean I had to suddenly disconnect with all my other partners. We both still date other people. He's in a band, so he's pretty much set when it comes to finding cute fan girls to flirt with. And I'm still seeing the Dom, the Muse, the Silver Fox, the Russian(s), the Redhead and most recently, the Friend(s). 

Sure, I'm a fan of the sexytimez (BIG FAN), but I haven't picked this life for my libido alone. It's not just about letting my slut flag fly. I've known or have been seeing most of the other people I'm dating on and off for almost a year. I still love meeting and connecting with NEW people. And none of this is a zero sum game. Intimacy certainly isn't. Why expect one partner to be your everything when it's possible to spread that love around a little? 

Basically, I get have my cake and eat it too. And so do all of my partners.

So why isn't EVERYONE doing this? Seriously. WHY? Most people never even CONSIDER non-mon0gamy as a lifestyle. 

I think that's because polyamory is really hard. It ain't for pussies. It's not all cake. It requires solid egos all around and the kind of communication skills most people only acquire after lots and LOTS of therapy. But miscommunication happens. Jealousy happens. And even then it's still mostly a matter of trial and error. You don't know something's going to hurt until it hurts. 

I have a LOT more to say on this topic, including a story about a recent set back, so I'm going to keep writing about it and probably make it a series. If you have questions, ask them. I'll do my best worst.

Oh, Love. You flighty little brat.

Post-race exhaustion aside, my heart is hanging in there. Of course, if I'm being honest, I still occasionally suffer from the terrifying thought that my one epic love is already behind me. Which would suck, yes, but I'm not too worried. My heart may be tired, but it's pretty fucking BIG and I'm braver than most about throwing it around.

Je ne regrette rien!

It helps that I've been trying to think about love in new and different ways. A few weeks ago a friend (who is now more than a friend) sent me an article about love - 10 things you might not know about [it].  I'm pretty sure there are far more than ten things I don't know about love, but the author's first point has really stuck with me through all my tribulations: 

"The vision of love that emerges from the latest science requires a radical shift. I learned that I need to ask people to step back from their current views of love long enough to consider it from a different perspective: their body's perspective. Love is not romance. It's not sexual desire. It's not even that special bond you feel with family or significant others.

And perhaps most challenging of all, love is neither lasting nor unconditional. The radical shift we need to make is this: Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of connection shared with another."

I've long understood that love was in the moment. With Joel, they were like multiple daily orgasms - watching him drum on his steering wheel, the way his hands splayed out on a keyboard, every time he ever took off his glasses. The sum of those moments is what made me so sure I was IN love with him. 

But moments aren't forever. They're fleeting and tragic. All you can really do is collect them in your heart, pack them into heavy boxes and carry them from house to house in a Uhaul. 

Fortunately not all the love I feel is tragic. 

There's the kind of love I feel for SamnTerry and Sophie, which is constant, ever-present and expansive. I can't think of a single thing they could ever do that would lessen my adoration for them. (A feeling that is mutual right up until Sam and I start talking about running, and then Terry just wants to murder us both.) All of My People have specific text and ring tones on my phone, so even if they contact me while I'm knuckle-deep in vag, the robot-ring (Sam) or the choo-choo chime (Terry) tells me I have something to look forward to between clients. Those sounds always makes my heart lurch. But there are love moments with them too. The first time I saw Sohpie with short hair. Every time I see Terry's atom tattoo. Opening a beer for Sam. Too many to count.

Then there are my children, who taught me to love in the first place. Have I ever told that story? How I always THOUGHT I was in love my husband. I mean, I put up with him, right? So I must love him. I just thought it was like that for everybody, something you slogged your way through. But then I held Alex for the first time and something happened to my BODY. I could have dismissed it, but it kept happening over and over again until I recognized that THAT was love. That angry, gut-wrench of fear. It was explosive and always left me shaking. It was knowing my world would end if anything ever happened to him. And that's how I found out I wasn't really in love with my husband - because I had never really felt that way about him. 

But I get to feel that love for my children every day. Like when I'm driving and Alex lets me hold his hand. His freckles. Hearing him singing along to the radio because he knows all the words. My daughter's lips. The way she already puts her hands on her hips and cocks her head when she sasses me. Hearing her clomp around the house in my high heels. Waking up next to her tiny little gas stove of a body.

Those are the heart clinchers.

For me, love doesn't even have to involve another person. During summer in Portland, the feel of the air on my skin is a love moment. The sound of a freight train going by. That first sip of REALLY GOOD wine. The other day while at COSTCO of all places, I had the strangest sensation that someone had brushed up against my shoulder. When I looked, no one was there, but my body experienced the same exact physical sensations that I get from love. 

And let's not forget RUNNING. The only thing better than sex is going for a run and THEN having sex. 

Hello, ENDORPHINS ^ENDORPHINS!

So I think my heart is doing okay. My buckets are pretty full, even without Joel. And the beautiful thing about looking at love differently is that it takes all the pressure off of finding MR. RIGHT. It would be easy to spend the rest of my life trying to find that big epic love again. But when I break it down into moments, I realize that I feel ROMANTIC love all the time. Even though I wouldn't say I'm necessarily "in" love with anyone. (Yet.) Those are big letters. I.N. Two BIG, BIG letters. 

But I still get to have that first embrace after not seeing someone for six months. The smell of a lover's hair (if they happen to have any) (which is rare). The feel of a freshly shorn bald head. That surprise kiss from the most gorgeous woman in the room. Tracing a tattoo over a freckled forearm. Sighs that are more than just happy. Shushes that mean a lot more than "be quiet."  That look. That smile. SWEET JEEBUS, DON'T SMILE AT ME LIKE THAT. Lady skin. Chest hair. Music. Morning-breath kisses. A perfectly placed kiss on the back of my neck. Taste. Touch. Warm hands on my back. 

Don't even get me started on kissing. 

It turns out that love moments are astonishingly available to me when I just say yes. Love actually IS all around me. And just like when I'm in the middle of a hard run, all I have to do is look up. It's RIGHT THERE. I'm sure my heart will fall INto it when it's ready. I just have to keep leaning into the moments.

The race that broke the camel's back

On Thursday morning I got up at the gluteal cleft of dawn and ran a half marathon on Sauvie Island. It turned out to be kind of a big deal for me, but not for the reasons you'd expect. I was never really worried about the run itself. Not the physical aspects of it anyway. I'd been training for months and aside from my recent snot fest of doom, I thought I was pretty ready. I'd put in my miles, most of which were on hills and trails, so I hoped that a flat street race would be cake.

I was PHYSICALLY ready. 

Emotionally? Not so much. 

The short version is that this race was one of the reasons I ended my relationship with Joel, one of the final straws in a series of milkshakes that were never going to bring him to my yard. He wouldn't come watch me race because he isn't a morning person.

The long version is that the race was on Sauvie Island at 6:30AM, but for $7.50 you could buy a shuttle pass from town to avoid parking hassles. When I registered for the race, without even THINKING about it, I bought a second shuttle pass for Joel. For me it was just an assumption - that my partner would come watch me run. It's my THING. This thing I love to do more than any other thing. He'd missed both of my other races, so I didn't think twice about whether he'd be there. There was no decision. Just a universal assumption, the kind you would make about any romantic entanglement. You're not going to fuck my best friend and you're going to love watching me cross finish lines. I assumed he would WANT to be there.

I was wrong.

He didn't want to get up that early. Couldn't I find a different race that started later? I mean, it's just ONE race. It's not like it's the Boston Marathon or anything.

I sat there listening to him mansplain himself and tried to imagine a single thing I wouldn't have done for him. And I couldn't - my love for him was way too big to ever say no to him. Stupid and unrequited, in hindsight, but that love was very very real to me. If he'd wanted me to wake up early to go watch him play drums, I would've jumped at the chance. Fuck, I'd have woken up at the asscrack of dawn to watch him pick huckleberries if it was something he loved to do. And I'm not a morning person either.

Apparently I'd made a faulty assumption - that because I would do anything for HIM, he would also do anything for ME. He found that assumption offensive - an unrealistic expectation just waiting for me to complain about. I found (and still find) that assumption beautiful.

The crazy thing is that I probably could have lived with it. So he wouldn't come to my races! Whatever. I wasn't running for HIM, for fuck's sake. I was running for ME. And he had other, more redeeming qualities. I fucking adored him. Then Sam decided to sign up for the race, too, so I had a member of my tribe there with me anyway! Yay! Let Joel sleep! 

But it was a huge tipping point. It broke my heart.

Seeing your partner happy is supposed to make you happy. (Compersion anyone?) Which is an entirely different thing than expecting your partner to MAKE you happy or having unrealistic expectations of your partner. I didn't EXPECT Joel to come to the race. Not at all. I just assumed that he would want to.

I think it goes without saying that I fucked up A LOT of things in our relationship too. The only reason I'm writing about any of this is because this is MY story and running is a big part of it. I couldn't write about the race without talking about why it was important to me. As far as the break up is concerned, I can say that expectations and assumptions lead to disappointment. I did everything I could to let go of my own expectations and just BE. But he had the one expectation that trumped all of them - he expected me to expect nothing. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't do that.

So yeah. The race was a big deal. I didn't really think twice about the Joel factor until the day before the race when I kept randomly bursting into tears at the mere thought of running. I was so emotional that I started feeling like I needed to run my fucking GUTS OUT. Like the race was a way to prove something to myself. Maybe it would prove I was worthy. That I wasn't the broken one.

Who knows.

The race itself turned out to be rather unspectacular. I ran. And ran. And ran. And even though nothing hurt, per se, and I wasn't out of breath at all, eventually I got tired. Just... TIRED. Fatigued. Exhausted.

And I let myself walk a few steps.

It should've felt like a failure that I didn't run it balls out - as fast as my feet could go - but I did fucking KEEP GOING. The beauty of any race is that the miles pass whether you walk them or run them as long as you keep going. My official time was 2:12. I overran the course again (my Nike app clocked me at 14 miles and with a much faster 9:30 pace...) which means I really need to be more cautious about weaving through people traffic. It wasn't the time I was hoping for, but it was respectable enough, I thought. 

Of course, exactly like my last half marathon, this one took me a day or two to process. But I finally figured out that the race was the perfect metaphor for my life: 

Hearts get tired, too, and sometimes they need to walk.

The only remedy is to just. keep. loving.

Cinco de Junio

I drove out to the beach today,
thinking it best to burn off my endorphin high
while the kids busied themselves building sand castles.

But the water was too blue
and the sun too bright
for anything but glee.

My bottle of cider somehow caught
the wind blowing off the river and became a flute.

And my boy tried to catch a fish
with the pole he'd constructed from a broken broom handle
and a paperclip.

All the while a bright yellow crop duster
practiced his air show stunts above us.

I took a nap in the sun.

Watched my kids have a sand fight.

Broke my face smiling over a slumber party invitation from a cute boy.

Then I took a photo of my daughter with my cell phone
and thought of nothing but gratitude.

How lucky am I to have the life I never knew I wanted?

Recipe for a new leaf

It's nice being single again. It's still an adjustment, sure, but different from any of the previous iterations of singledom I've experienced since my divorce. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not out there humping the leg of everything with a pulse. My girlfriends all want the juicy details, but I seem to have lost my whorepants in the wash. Sorry!

Instead, I'm dating myself (okay, fine, maybe there's that ONE guy, I'm no martyr). I'm running in the forest. Joining meetup groups. Reading. Writing. (Fiction!) Reconnecting with friends. Dancing. (Good lord I forgot how much I love to dance. Especially since dropping it to the floor is really good for the glutes.) Working. (Busy season!) Playing mom. More running.

Last night Dave offered to take the kids at the last minute, so I was on my own. I spent an hour cleaning my kitchen and that always leads to the same conclusion: an insatiable urge to get it dirty again. But I had no one to cook for. You know, except me. And there's a novel idea. Real Food. Cooked by me. FOR ME. Duh.

Three hours later, I had a new pesto recipe and one hell of a dinner date. Fresh-rolled pasta with arugula pecan pesto and broiled salmon:
I usually hate cooking for myself because, honestly, if a tree falls in the forest and there isn't anyone around to taste it, is it still as amazing as I think it is?

Turns out, yes. Yes it is.      

 

The vaguest recipe for homemade pasta ever written (I don't follow a recipe any more):

Go out to the chicken coop.

Collect the eggs. (At least the ones you can find. One of our chickens is a hider...)

Add them to flour (before they get cold!).

Knead.

Add flour and/or eggs until you have a smooth dough. 

Let sit.

Roll/cut/shape to your heart's desire.

Recipe for Arugula Pecan Pesto:

Combine in your cuisinart/food proessor/hand blender/mortar and pestle:

2C baby arugula

3 cloves garlic

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1/4 tablespoon lemon zest

Salt/pepper

2 Tablespoons roughly shredded parmesan (the good shit from Italy) (Don't skimp.)

Olive oil (I prefer Tuscan.)

Serve with a baby arugula and strawberry salad and a side of who needs a man anyway.

What I ACTUALLY thought about during Sunday's half marathon

First off, I got to the starting line over half an hour late (in spite of the fact that Lola may have the best parking karma of any car I've ever owned. FREE SPOT TWO BLOCKS AWAY!). This meant that even though I'd signed up for the 2:30 corral, which turned out to be number 16, I had already missed my starting time.

Since I was late anyway, I decided it didn't matter and found a Honey Bucket before sneaking in with corral 23. This was both a blessing and a curse. The curse was that I'd joined a mostly WALKING corral and I wanted to RUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN. So I spent the first ten minutes weaving through bodies, which, while fun, tends to be a waste of both energy and speed.

But running a half marathon and passing people the whole time? Not bad for the ego. Just saying.

My only goal for this race was to run the whole thing. But then every time that Nike+ Bitch interrupted my run to tell me how fast I was going, I WILLED myself to slow down. I had planned to run 11-minute miles the whole time, but I was doing 9:34, 9:45, 9:30, 9:36, 9:12. So thinking about (my time) didn't really happen. I didn't stress about it at all and just accepted the fact that I was going to be walking up the hills because I had the time. Oddly enough, I looked forward to them, if for no other reason than the speed I got BOOKING IT down the other sides. (Why don't more runners SPRINT the downhills?!? Highlight of the fucking race!)

And then...

There were My People.

You have NO IDEA you guys. I know I've talked about SamnTerry before and how they are My People, but I don't know if I've ever talked about how they are my SAFE CALL People. I wish I didn't mean that in the way it sounds, but I do. I'd like to think I'm theirs too.

Normally, I would've had Dave take the kids during my race, but instead I kissed them goodbye and left them with my roommate, Sage until Sam could get there. Then Sam not only came to my race, but he picked up my kids and drove them all around town so they could cheer me on from multiple stops along the route. (Terry would've been there, too, but she was jet laaaaaaaged.)

Sam and my kids met me at mile 6 and mile 8 and mile 10 (I think) and every time I saw them, I got choked up. I mean, sitting around waiting for someone to run by is BORING, but it meant so, so much to me. And every time I saw them, I ran faster.

Between those miles, the music kept me going. Thanks, Pink! And that one recent song by Maroon 5 about hating yourself the next morning. Unfortunately, all my music was too slow. I'd set up an 11-minute mile play list and I was running 9:40's. That'll be fixed by the next race.

So that whole thing about me obsessing over my time?

Didn't happen at all!

My mind was completely open. I felt like a squirrel. Trees. Water. Beauty. Beats. MY KIDS! That one big guy who I wanted to tap on the shoulder and give a thumbs up to, but worried it might come across as patronizing because there's no way he could possibly know I used to weigh more than him. Beauty. Beats. Water. MY KIDS! Gu tastes like dog ass. FINDING A BATHROOM. Water. FINDING A BATHROOM. Downhill. Squeeeeeeeeee!

My knees were fine. My breathing was excellent. By mile nine, my hips and the balls of my feet were starting to bark. Fuck them, though, I still couldn't slow myself down. I was too busy singing along to the music, and, all too often, raising my hands to the non-existent roof. Even my fellow runners (all of which are obviously lunatics) were looking at me funny.

When it got hard (hello mile 12!), I was able to force myself to look up. And magically, almost hallucinogenically, I got that same full body glitter bomb I got the last time it got hard for me along the Willamette. Endorphins!!! This time it brought tears to my eyes because I had no idea that kind of magic was accessible to me all along. It's IN me. I think it might be there any time I need. I just have to LOOK. THE. FUCK. UP.

I wish I could say the race was somehow life-changing, but it wasn't. Basically I found this thing I love to do with this body and I was just doing it. It really isn't a big deal.

My only real epiphany was that I wasn't looking for Joel along the route. I wasn't expecting or even hoping that he'd show up. It took me a day or two to process, but if this race was about anything, it was about how I've spent the last two and half years WAITING. With my phone hovering in my hand. In cars. In restaurants. In bars. Crying in my bath tub. At church. At home. At my stove wondering whether or not to start dinner. On his front porch in the rain. In my HEART. This stupidly open heart of mine has been waiting and waiting for something that was never going happen. I probably would have spent the rest of my life waiting if I hadn't snapped. Every finish line would have been a disappointment.

13.1 miles later, I'm done waiting. I refuse to be disappointed by anyone but myself.

The beauty is I didn't have to wait for Sam to show up and be there for me - with my kids. In fact, I almost completely missed them in the middle of that two mile stretch on Hawthorne because I was just trying to make it up the hill. Seeing them there was a SURPRISE.

They were just there. My People. As it should be. They filled me with lovelovelovelovelovelove.

But the biggest surprise of all was that I surprised myself:

My official time (including a five-minute potty break) was 2:16:47. But I paused my Nike+ app for my poop break, so Nike's total time for the full course (which the GPS said was 13.6 miles) was 2:14:13.

Nike's 13.1 mile time was 2:07:37.

Apparently I have one helluva PR to beat on Independence Day.

No more waiting for this broad. I'd rather run.

Wildwood

My most recent breakup with Joel has made for a difficult few weeks, especially since this one is our fourth and final end. No backsies. We couldn't live together, I couldn't live apart from him and now I'm permanently stuck in the very predicament that was causing my misery. (Don't waste your money on the tasting flight, just trust me that irony pairs perfectly with crow.)

My mood is better than you'd expect, actually. I'm still smiling at strangers, happy with my clients, singing along to the radio and texting cute boys, but then the lyrics will remind me of him (Fuck you, Bruno Mars!) and I'll start sobbing like a ten-year-old girl, only to be perfectly fine again five minutes later. It'd be disconcerting if it wasn't so terribly normal. I've spent two and half years with a plus one at my side. This DUDE's been hanging around all the time and now he's gone. Poof! Just like that. No matter what the reasons were, I still need to grieve that loss. Dude loss. (Or can I just carry it forward and use it to offset future dude gains?) (<-- See that? TAX humor! Win!)

None of this is supposed to be easy and it isn't. I hate it when people ask me how I'm doing because they don't really want the truth and I don't really want to lie. Grief, even when long overdue and self-inflicted, is never pretty. Beautiful perhaps, gut-wrenchingly, horrifically human, but never comfortable to watch from the bleachers.

Sorry about that. I promise it's not contagious. I'm just an over-sharer. I didn't let him tattoo BE WHO YOU ARE on my chest for nothing.

I'm also a terrible actress, so I'm going to skip the stoic facade where I pretend I'm fine! and totally okay! Instead I'm going to cope by running my ass off. I figure I'll run 100 miles for every year we were together. That's an easy 250 miles for this tough-ass broad, even if sobbing while running up a mountain isn't as easy as I'd hoped. (You can breathe or you can cry. They are mutually exclusive.)

I plan to run as many of those miles as I can on the Wildwood trail in Forest Park.

Ironically enough, my friend Brie introduced me to it on the last day of JoelandAmanda. (I actually read the final e-mail in our Dear John exchange from inside the Honey Bucket at the end of the Leif Erickson trail. There's one trip to the bathroom I'll never forget!). Anyway, I'd been feeling like a broken, useless, pile of shit all day and that run saved my ass almost as much as Brie's secret toilet paper stash. She and I gave each other therapy all the way up the hill (which was hard) (in a good way), but the downhill was magical.

Her sweat kept splattering me in the face; there were so many bees I thought for sure I was going to inhale one; and everything was so green in every direction that I wondered, briefly, if I, myself, had turned into part of the mountain. I would call it an out of body experience except I don't think I've ever been more inside my body than I was on that run. We flew down that mountain whooping and hollering and giggling like schoolgirls.



I've never felt stronger or more alive. More present. More ME.

It turns out trail running is heroin. One shot and I was DONE.  Since I no longer have a plus one, on Saturday night I geared up (chapstick! toilet paper! water!) and went back for a hot trail date with myself. This time I had a goal - run five miles up, cry like a baby, and then book it back down in time to catch the sunset. 

Apparently I was still in the bargaining stage of grief because it felt like every step I ran up that hill spawned a new want. [breathe in] want, want, want [breathe out] want, WANT. Every footfall screamed at me. Want! I want so many things I'll never get. I want to be different. I want to change the past. I want to change perceptions. Perspectives. Events. I want him. Himhimhimhimhimhim. All things I can't have. If you're counting steps, ten miles is 20,000 wants.

I am SO on Buddha's shit list.

Or maybe not, because at one point on my way down the mountain I started to sob with the sheer gratitude of knowing I'd found this perfect green vessel for my grief. A place for me to stomp all my wants straight into the ground. A place for me to FEEL everything without holding back. I've decided to spend this summer sweating and crying and giggling and singing all of my grief right into the forest until there isn't anything left inside me but strength. It's beginning to feel almost sacred, this idea of giving my tears back to the trees.

Then I remembered something a cute Jewish professor (who was also a runner) told me on our first (and only) date, "Terwilliger still holds my divorce in its hills."

And my floodgates opened. Because how many other runners had left their tears on this exact stretch of trail? All of a sudden I wasn't just crying my OWN grief into Wildwood, I was crying for everyone who had ever experienced a loss and then handed it over to this forest. I felt like I could see every dying parent, lost dog, never-born child, painful divorce and unrequited love that had ever been felt there. So many tears! No wonder Oregon is so wet all the fucking time! I was surrounded by grief, almost as if I was running through mother nature's emotional compost bin.

Only instead of sadness, all that grief filled me with love. With acceptance.

Because we can't grieve if we never love. 

Grief is an expression of love.

So I'm going to keep handing my grief  - and my heart - over to the trees of Forest Park. I'm going to lean into the downhills like I lean into everything - love, discomfort, grief, vulnerability, opportunity. At some point I know I'm going to run too fast, trip over a twig and break my face, but I won't regret it any more than I'll ever regret loving Joel. Instead, I'll just book it down the next hill with the same fearless fervor as ever.

Balls out.

(Oooh! There's my next tattoo!)

If I get over this break up sooner than what seems normal, it's only because I've already been grieving it for months. I haven't met him yet, but some day I'll get to make someone the happiest man alive. I'm only sad it wasn't Joel. I loved him ferociously. (I fear only Henry Miller really groks how much.) But I'm determined to not let this grief change me. I'll stay this wide open and vulnerable and brutally honest and loud and abrasive - and beautifully, frightfully flawed - for the next guy. And he will love me BECAUSE of those things, not in spite of them.  

Until then, I'll have me.

And Wildwood.

Cinco de Mayo

I drove out to the beach today,
thinking it best to cry behind my sunglasses
while the kids busied themselves building sand castles.

But the water was too blue
and the sun too bright
for tears.

Until that hipster on the blanket down the beach
used his towel to clean the lens of his cell phone camera
before taking a picture of his girlfriend

and I thought of you.

Human Flight

Last night I was up at 1AM with the first real PANIC AT THE DISCO attack I've had in a few months. It was strange, actually; I'd forgotten how awful they are. But I've been struggling with a brain-body dilemma (Brain wants one thing, body wants another. WHICH ONE DO I LISTEN TO!?!?) and it's costing me a lot of sleep. I probably shouldn't have picked this particular week to stop going to therapy AND to invite everyone I know over for a party this weekend. My bad. It also doesn't help that a bunch of my hair got singed off during a bad dye job on Monday. There is literally a chunk missing right in the front where I normally part my hair. Oddly enough I keep forgetting I look like a freak because it's just that far down my list of things-to-give-a-shit-about.

Anyway, this morning I did what any exhausted, potentially insane woman with crackhead hair would do: I put on a hat and went for a run. In the sunshine. Along the Portland waterfront. Which was totally hideous, as usual:
Since I haven't posted in a while, it's probably worth noting that I didn't really have a choice. I'm training for a(nother) half marathon on 4th of July. This time there won't be any walking because I'm sticking to a training program and today was a seven mile day. Oh! And two weeks ago I ran my 8-minute mile on a treadmill. Can't wait to do it again at a track because YEE-FUCKING-HAW!

Anyway, today the sun was magnificent. The temperature perfect. Nearly everyone I passed had a shit-eating grin on their face. Especially one woman, who I noticed wasn't running on the path, but on the concrete wall beside it. I couldn't figure out why she was running up there. I just kept going: over the Burnside Bridge, under the Portland Oregon sign, down to the west bank of the river all the way up over the Steel Bridge and back around.

It's such a magical loop that I screwed my time up because I kept stopping to take pictures. It usually takes me about a mile to hit my groove, but today it came right away. Of course my life isn't all shits and giggles at the moment, so by about mile 2.75, I noticed my mind wandering to Things Over Which I Have No Control and my anxiety came back to thwomp me in the lungs. I was sad, defeated. I couldn't breathe. But I haven't been doing all this work for nothing, right? So I buried myself in the feelings, dug deeper into my body, picked up my pace and started gulping air into my belly like it was a pelican's craw.

It worked so well that by the time I came up on the East side of the river, I figured out why that woman had been running on the wall instead of the trail. I didn't realize it until I ran it myself, but the wall is not only flat (and better for my knees), but separated into segments with these 6" gaps between them. Every time I jumped over one of the gaps, I felt myself hover in the air like there was no gravity.

Whoa. This body. MAN. Not to quote Mackelmore or anything, but this is fucking awesome. It got even better when I passed a cute bald guy in a "Running Sucks" t-shirt who must've seen me leaping around like a second grader because he flashed me the most genuine, open-mouthed grin ever. I totally thought that was going to be the highlight of my day, but no. 

By mile six, my knee started to hurt and I felt my face twist into a grimace. I was visibly limping and seriously considered walking the final mile.

But mama wasn't having any of that. I shook my finger in my own face and forced myself to look down at the water. To be in the moment, inside my body, on the most beautiful day I could remember. The water was so blue and the sunlight bouncing off of it was so magnificent that I got the chills. It felt like the glitter jumped right off the river and onto my skin. I seriously wondered if maybe I was experiencing a psychotic break or even just a blood sugar deficit. It was THAT physical.

And all I had to do was look up. To notice.

Who knew?

I'm on the verge of something really big right now. I'm not sure what it is because it hasn't happened yet, but in that final stretch today, I decided to sprint across the Hawthorne bridge. Full speed. Balls out. I finished my run and realized that my problems are, sadly, a lot longer than seven miles. But all I could think was I got this. I'm going to be fine.

Going back to Cali*

Right around the day I filed my tax return, I got an e-mail invitation to a family reunion on Easter Sunday in California. My Aunt didn't have my e-mail address and went out of her way to make sure someone would forward it to me. When my cousin, Amber, e-mailed it to me I was honored. There's been a lot of water under that bridge and I've been worried that I'd actually burnt it down forever.

Apparently not.

For the first time in a long time, I had the money to Say Yes. So I did! I'm taking the whole clan to California for Spring break from March 30 through April 9th. Actually, only the kids and I will be gone that long. Joel starts a new job on Monday so he only gets to take a week off. Liza will be with us for about five days.

For me it will be ten days in the state formerly known as home.

I'm going to need an extra pair of running shoes and a hip flask if I'm going to survive, but my grandmother is turning 90. NINETY! So I can't miss it. Which makes it that much easier to get over myself and Joel will be right there next to me. 

So I'm good.

Actually, I'm stoked. I can't wait to run the squishy rubber track at Los Gatos High and show Joel the house I grew up in and the beach where I gave my first blow job. Both of my brothers are down to host and I can't wait to see them. I wonder if I'll cry when I see my nephews like I did the last time I was in San Francisco. They seem to grow so fast when I'm not around.

My only promise is to take a lot of pictures and see my therapist the moment I get back.

*... I don't think so.